EOA at Hilton Birmingham Metropole

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Brief

Provide full production services for the Employee Ownership Association annual conference held at Hilton Birmingham Metropole Hotel. Across 11 breakout rooms and the main hall, sessions were held to celebrate the excellence in Employee Owned Businesses.

This was the second year that Premier have been asked to provide AV support for this event. Months before the event has started, Pre-Production is fully underway and all aspects of making the event come together are being considered. Breakout rooms will hold sessions to advertise current business states and promote ideas within the sector, to effectively do these the sessions require flawless yet simplistic Audio & Video. The main hall was the focal point of this conference and will require audio, video, lighting, power & rigging for up to 700 attendees.

Process:

One of the most important aspects of this conference was being given a schedule for the event and making production requirements slot in easily. The planning was extensive and in the months leading up to the event we looked at how the event can take place with absolutely no footprint on the delegates experience of it.

A conference that is this important must be composed of idealistic views that can be shaped into reality effectively. For the main hall a site visit which took place months before the event, gave us insight into the room and how best to get as much coverage as possible to the 700 delegates.

Premier opted for a set structure at a height of 16 feet, running the width of the room (almost 25m). Built into the set would be 3 screens, 2 for content and live camera feeds and 1 for branding and awareness.

The schematic of this room would allow us to propose a truss structure composed of intelligent moving heads alongside generic stage wash fixtures and 10K Laser Projectors.

As always with events, detailed and correct logistics make the event days run smoothly and with EOA 2017 this was crucial, allowing the correct amount of time to setup these rooms and for when rooms breakout into more rooms, it can be done in the allocated time.

To assure full reliability across all areas, Premier took it upon themselves to have a dedicated Client Liaison that had all the content required for all rooms. This Client Liaison went around each room and uploaded the correct content and then tested it in 16:9 to ensure no issues would arise mid-session.

Equipment Used

For the breakout rooms at EOA we needed to setup 9 PA systems, 9 Projectors & Screens, 9 Lecterns with HDMI & Audio, 9 Amps & 9 Mixers. For the PA we had the L’Acoustics 8XT & X8 Speakers, these were perfect for this setting with coverage for up to 100 people in any space. Running these speakers were the LA8 & LA4X amplifiers which are simple and easy to use, these amps were fed a L & R from the Soundcraft EPM12 mixers which offer simplicity and require very little time to setup.

The main conference was the centre point of this event and had control setup to run presentations & lighting states. Our very own L’Acoustics KARA was flown stage right and left and offered coverage in the main room with ease. The audio chain from microphone to speaker is crucial and must be reliable, our new RIO stage boxes offer us the advantage of plugging microphones in at stage and running 1 multicore consisting of 4x CAT6 cables to control thus offering redundancy in our system. At control we had a Yamaha QL5 which works with DANTE, a network audio protocol which allows us to send audio over ethernet, efficiently and reliably.

To give presenters an easy time on stage, Premier installed 2 comfort monitors which showed a timer and the current slide being projected. This allows all sessions to run on time and prevents the presenter having to turn around for every slide.